A group of Eastern European beggars today returned to Marble Arch hours after Mayor of London Boris Johnson warned EU law will leave authorities powerless to stop penniless immigrants from settling in the capital.

The woman with the cropped dyed red hair was very cross. She was gesticulating wildly and a stream of German was being directed my way, the only word of which I vaguely understood being "servietta". I was cutting a slice of freshly baked black bread at the breakfast bar of the Posthotel in the Tyrolean mountains. I looked across at the stack of nearby starched white napkins and realised my crime. I had touched the brot. With my naked hand.

Stretched out across the front page of Sweden's best-selling daily paper, Aftonbladet, a horizontal Sven Goran Eriksson and his Manchester City squad limber up in the sunshine alongside a light-hearted headline that reads "Lying down, training hard".

I was in that twilight world between sleep and consciousness when the text message alert announced the inevitable - that Wills and Kate had split. A few moments later, the Today programme - with typically absurd BBC pomposity - 'confirmed' it. In the hours that followed, Guy and I were besieged in a way we had not been for half a dozen years: broadcasters wanting Guy, as a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, to comment on the alleged harassment of Kate Middleton; the papers wanting me to write about what it all meant. It brought back horrible memories of weekends swallowed up by the monster of royal intrigue. And we both declined to speak to anyone about it.